Evaluation of the Gini Coefficient in Spatial Scan Statistics for Detecting Irregularly Shaped Clusters.

ABSTRACT: Spatial scan statistics with circular or elliptic scanning windows are commonly used for cluster detection in various applications, such as the identification of geographical disease clusters from epidemiological data. It has been pointed out that the method may have difficulty in correctly identifying non-compact, arbitrarily shaped clusters. In this paper, we evaluated the Gini coefficient for detecting irregularly shaped clusters through a simulation study. The Gini coefficient, the use of which in spatial scan statistics was recently proposed, is a criterion measure for optimizing the maximum reported cluster size. Our simulation study results showed that using the Gini coefficient works better than the original spatial scan statistic for identifying irregularly shaped clusters, by rep

SUBMITTER: Kim J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5271318 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature